He fishes using a trap; a wire cage about two metres square, with bait inside and a funnel entry.

The fish get stuck inside and all he has to do is haul the cage on deck.

There are 205 people with licences for the fishery, but only 70 active fishermen.

It is the non-active fishermen that are causing problems, what the department calls "latent effort".

A large part of reforms proposed now, are about removing those licences, but Paul Sullivan says it's a problem the department created.

"Twenty years we've been putting up with the perceived latent effort, ever since the department went to a share management fishery and misallocated the shares."

Understanding the reforms is difficult, because they vary for each fishery.

The two key reforms proposed for the trap and line fishery and an increase to the minimum shareholdings and the equal allocation of shares to latent and active fishermen.

Paul Sullivan is opposed to both proposals.

"They want us to go 60 or 80 shares in the first year and finally get to 106.

"I only need 40 shares to run a business...[but] if you don't have the minimum shares, the department won't allow you to fish."

If the proposal is endorsed by the Structural Adjustment Committee and the Minister for Agriculture, Paul will have to buy 60 more shares.

"I'll be looking at about $40-50 thousand."

The second proposal called "equal allocation" could be an even bigger challenge for fishermen like Paul Sullivan.

"They're going to link the shares to days...so you'll get 'x' number of days to go to work.

"They get the number of days fished currently...then they divide that into the total number of shares held in the fishery [including the latent fishermen] and we get allocated 37 days each.

"I currently work of 200 days a year and they will allocate me 37 days."

He calculates he would have to buy seven or eight businesses to get back to working 200 days a year.

"That would cost $160-180 thousand, I'm devastated."

Fisheries officer from the Department of Primary Industry Doug Ferrell, concedes it will be tough for many fishermen like Paul Sullivan.

"It's diabolical for the active guys because it takes all their effort and spreads it over the inactive guys."

But he is adamant that change is necessary because the latent licence holders have rights too.

"They're a property right and if we change the value of that right for some people and not others, we end up in hot water."

Fishermen claim the department is asking them to fix a problem they created, by "misallocating the shares", twenty years ago.

Paul Sullivan says they "bungled it up" so badly that, that legally, it's too difficult to sort it out and the department wants "to force active fishermen to clean up their mess."

Doug Ferrell concedes the department does share responsibility saying "the allocation was bad," but he says fishermen at the time argued for shares to be allocated equally and not, as has been done in other fisheries, according to catch history.

"They were saying back to the department we're happy if everyone is equal.

"The department, in my personal view, should have been standing up to say 'not a good idea', and in fact the ocean haul industry said 'No, we want you to use our catch history' and they're not having this kind of fight that the trap and line or the estuary guys are."

What fishermen want

Paul Sullivan has represented the trap and line fishing sector on a number of committees and he has also made a submission to the Structural Adjustment Committee outlining the reforms he thinks would work better to deal with the "latent effort" issue.

He would like to see a "soft linkage" of gear to shares, allowing fishermen to invest in more shares, but gain the right to fish with more gear.

"I'm happy to invest," he says "if it means operating more gear and getting a return for it."

He is also proposing an industry funded structural adjustment levy to raise money to buy shares back from fishermen.

"They could use the $16m exit grant, buy a lot of fishermen out, and [over] time buy more licences in targeted areas."

Doug Ferrell thinks both of those ideas are worth considering although he says "soft linkage basically allows everyone to keep on doing what they're doing."

"In terms of setting a cap, it makes them unrealistically large."

He says the department needs caps in order to say to the community they have the industry and the sustainability issue "under control".

On the industry levy funding a buy back scheme, Doug says the idea has been discussed, but some fishermen prefer to have that money in their own pockets and with 100 share classes in the fishing industry in NSW, he says it's not possible "to take a blanket approach".